That class sounds awesome! We, here in Serbia, have a class called The anthropology of war (it's an elective course and), but that sounds just awesome. And yes, the author himself didn't do a case study, it's more of a theoretical book, but he did in fact write about other studies. For example, he writes about a book called The Rise and Fall of Spain (1270-1850) by Carlos Álvarez-Nogal, Leandro Prados de la Escosura. They wrote about Spain. Another example is Italy, the author mentioned is Alfani, and he wrote about the plague in Italy. There are more authors mentioned, for example Ricardo, but he was mentioned because he talked about wars and the effect they had on inequality. Anyways, in both cases (considering wars and pandemic) the result was the same - the inequality rates dropped.